The present invention generally relates to a telephone communication system, and in particular, to a personal computer interactive phone system which utilizes existing telephone equipment and existing phone wiring.
Increasingly, many homes may have one or more telephone sets and a modern personal computer (PC). With increasing performance needs and expectations on home telephone systems, more and more consumers are demanding that the home telephone system have more intelligence and processing capabilities at an affordable price. Telephony features that consumers may find desirable in a home telephone system include: (i) caller ID announcement, (ii) voice activated auto-dial, (iii) message center access from any phone in the home, (iv) routing of incoming calls to specific phones in the home, (v) in-house intercom with no additional wiring of the home, (vi) screening of incoming messages from any phone in the home, (vii) home convenience package including list maker and scheduler, and (viii) speech recognition.
In order for a telephone system which provides the above telephony features to be marketable to consumers, the telephone system ideally would be (i) inexpensive, (ii) flexible to form a specific telephone system for a household, (iii) adaptable to existing telecommunication technology, (iv) adaptable to consumer's existing telephone equipment and house wiring, (v) simple to install, and (vi) non-interfering with regular operation of existing home telephone system.
Method and apparatus are therefore needed which may be integrated with existing telephone equipment to provide advanced telephony features to existing telephone equipment.